Meetings
EGU Great Debates set the trend

EGU Great Debates set the trend

Some features of www.egu.eu will not appear or function properly if your
browser does not have JavaScript enabled, or does not
support it.

Soon after its creation in 2002, EGU launched two innovations. The first
was the policy that all EGU publications should be open access, and the
second was the inauguration of the Great Debates in the Geosciences at the
EGU annual General Assembly. The idea was to find an alternative to normal
meeting fare – a talk of 15 minutes, the time totally consumed by the speaker
leaving no opportunity for questions or discussion. The new format was based
loosely on Oxford Union debates, with two teams debating controversial
topics, each defending an opposing point of view. In this way informed
experts were able to explain and inform the audience on important topics in a
lively and entertaining way.

The idea has worked extremely well. The first Great Debates in the
Geosciences were held at the EGU General Assembly in 2005 and since then
debates have had a regular place in the programme.

The first debates were on two geoscientific topics: ‘Flood volcanism is the
main cause of mass extinctions and oxygenic photosynthesis appeared on Earth
at least 3.8Ga ago’. Very quickly, however, the themes evolved to topics of
social or economic interest. Some were rather frivolous ‘We must curtail the
use of Artificial Snow’, and others more weighty ‘The carbon footprint of
EGU is bigger than necessary’. Proponents for the latter motion, true to
their convictions, took the 15-hour train trip from their British university
to the General Assembly in Vienna. Others foresaw future developments: in
2006 two teams debated whether ‘In 30 years petroleum will have become a
little-used energy source’.

The quality of debate varied. Some were rather flat because the team members
were unfamiliar with the debate concept and were reluctant to defend
unflinchingly their team's position. One of the best debates ensued when a
staunch advocate of geoengineering was told on his arrival in Vienna that a
member of the opposing team was unable to make it, and having changed sides,
argued convincingly and enthusiastically against the motion that
‘Geo-engineering should be part of our climate mitigation portfolio’. Another
very successful event was the debate on
Shale Gas: to frack or not to frack?
in 2013. A conference hall seating 500 people was filled to overflowing and
several hundred people followed the debate on live streaming. The audience
was strongly divided, many following the arguments of a Greenpeace activist,
others more convinced by the opinions expressed by the opposing team.

The concept launched by EGU has now taken off and in the past two years,
several other geoscience unions have successfully adopted the EGU model. Two
great debates co-sponsored by EGU were held at the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting on
topics such as ‘Sustainable development in the Arctic’. The Japanese
Geosciences Union will soon launch its own series. Similar topics will be
treated at the forthcoming EGU Assembly with the topic rephrased as the
motion ‘Sustainable development is impossible in the Arctic’. Another debate
will return to the original big scientific question model and two teams will
debate the purely scientific motion that ‘Plate Tectonics started in the
PaleoArchean’. Full details of this year’s debates are to be found in the
EGU 2016 programme
and videos of many earlier debates are available
on the EGU website.

We hope this tradition will live on as one of the mainstays of our
professional geoscience meetings across the globe and we are pleased to have
kicked this particular ball into the Unions playing fields.

About EGU

EGU, the European Geosciences Union, is Europe’s premier geosciences union, dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in the Earth, planetary, and space sciences for the benefit of humanity, worldwide. It was established in September 2002 as a merger of the European Geophysical Society (EGS) and the European Union of Geosciences (EUG), and has headquarters in Munich, Germany.